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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I can't believe how dumb all of you are seriously

No one is underpaid.  Yall are choosing and continuing to stay in a profession.  If you are underpaid quit and do a job that pays more

It is supply and demand.

Starting salaries for teachers have increased because of supply and demand

I think some of you are jealous because you have 15 years in and are making peanuts.  The pay scale is  public knowledge

Props to the nurse on here that actually has some common sense

The current cycle is what happened with entry level IT labor.  Look it up.

And yes teaching and nursing are entry level.  [b]At least in nursing there is a promotion path[/b] vs teaching where a 0 year teacher does the exact same thing as a 30 year teacher.

If you want to be paid more there has to be more job differentiation to allow for higher salaries and guess what its unions that are fighting against that.[/quote]

I'm another nurse.

There's a promotion path in nursing if you &quot;leave the bedside&quot; and get a master's degree to become a nurse practitioner in a well-compensated field of medicine (speciality medicine like orthopedics or anesthesia) OR if you go into nursing administration.  Both are great career paths but are similar to a teacher becoming a curriculum developer for an education company or a principal.  There is more money to be made but not in the original role.  You also have to pay $100-150K for NP or nurse anesthesia school (prices for a master's in nursing have gone through the roof in recent years--most are &gt;$150K).

I've been a nurse for 20 years and the staring salaries at major hospitals (Hopkins, Georgetown, etc) are the SAME today as they were 20 years ago.  A nurse with a bachelors' degree wil start at around $65K.  And like teaching there is very room for salary increases unless you change job title and completely leave the traditional nurse role.  If you stay working as an ICU nurse (and the world NEEDS experienced ICU nurses) you will likely be making $85K 20 years in. 
As a result in a place like DC you either have constant turn-around in these jobs or you have nurses who work in DC put live 2 hours away or you even have hospital bringing in foreign nurses because they will live in boarding home type settings so they can afford to live closer in.  Salaries have not kept up with inflation--they have been stable (if not decreased) for 20+ years.

Anyway, it's a constant issue and will continue to be because nursing is an almost entirely female field and has never had a true voice in the healthcare arena.  They one market where they do have a voice (because they're heavily unionized) is in California.  And there nurses make about twice what they do in DC.  A bedside nurse can start for $120K and be at &gt;$150K within a few years.

Also--I wanted to address travel nursing as I know it's been all over the press with the pandemic.  There is definitely money to be made but it's not always simple.  These are short (8-12 week) contracts and don't always come with benefits (maybe health insurance but never PTO). They are commonly in hospital settings that are particularly hard to work and undesirable: under-staffed, under-supported hospitals.  Places that can't retain staff through traditional hiring channels so they have to pay more to a traveling company.  It's also difficult to get back-to-back travel contracts.  So you may make $$ for 12 weeks but then have no income for 3.  Plus the factor that you have to travel which is difficult if not impossible to do with kids and a partner (hey guys, we're moving to Boise for 3 months.  Pack up!)[/quote]

There's also a promotion path for teachers: They can eventually become principals and other senior school administrators. But instead it seems some of the PPs want to stay in the same entry-level job for 30 years while also making executive-level salaries.[/quote]

I'm not sure anyone is looking for executive level salaries but just a living wage.

I was hired as a new nurse in 1999 for $65K.  That is same salary being given to nurses in DC (with a bachelor's degree) today in 2022.  Instead of increasing salaries, hospitals are finding sources of cheaper labor (foreign grads, unlicensed personnel, higher nurse-to-patient ratios).  None are good for patient care.  
Instead of increasing teachers salaries, states are finding cheaper labor (allowing people to teach without degrees, etc).

You could increase the starting salaries of these professions by $10-20K/year and you would change a lot.  Not executive level salaries.  As it stands, there is no way I would have my child go into either profession.  You can't afford to live in any area outside of rural America.  I mean, you can scrape by but there is no hope of home ownership, etc without a partner who makes more.  I have kids in DCPS and my kid's teachers commute in from up to 2 HOURS AWAY because they want to live in a place larger then a one bedroom (they have kids, etc).  [/quote]

[b]This is true for a lot of fields[/b], wage stagnation is a huge issue in the US. My mom is an engineer who has worked on and off as a contractor for the main employer in our small town....got mad last year that she had the same hourly rate as in 1999. My partner is a professor making $60k and this conversation made me curious...I looked it up and the average salary for a professor in 1999 was $58k. (This is one reason for the exodus from academia to tech.) I'm a fed, so you can look all that up, but the interesting thing there is that the boomers who've retired from the jobs me and my millennial peers are in were a full grade level higher. The agency has systematically "downgraded" the same work as people retire.

I'm not discounting the impact this has on teachers or nurses! Just saying that thinking it's unique to one field pits us middle class workers against each other or keeps us from seeing the big picture, when *most* of us have lost purchasing power over the last 20 years.  [/quote]

DP
Understood, but the OP addressed nursing and teaching specifically.[/quote]

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